TechCrunch: Samsung has begun rolling out its answer to Apple Pay in Korea this week. The service is called Samsung Pay and it is powered by LoopPay, the Boston-based company that Samsung snapped up earlier this year. It’s due to launch in Korea and the U.S. first before expanding worldwide, but Samsung has nudged it into action with a pre-launch pilot program among Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge owners in its home country.

They seem nearly identical, but Samsung Pay has a couple if differences compared to Apple Pay.

While both support NFC, Samsung’s service goes a step further with support for magnetic secure transmission (MST) technologies in existing point of sale devices. That’s convenient for retailers who don’t need to upgrade their terminals to support it.

Like Apple, Samsung customers pay by putting their device near the payment terminal in store and either authenticate payment via their fingerprint or by inputting a code. The Samsung Pay app lets users stash a range of credit cards for use, but actual data is neither stored on device nor sent during a transaction. Samsung said it uses “a variety of security technologies and a high level encryption system” to keep data safe.

The Korean firm shuttered its wallet service earlier this year, explaining that “the usage rate was not what anyone expected.” It then moved on to payments with the deal for LoopPay. It’s still early days for Apple Pay, which expanded into the UK this week, and it’ll be interesting to see what kind of impact Samsung’s response has — both in terms of retail and engagement/retention of existing Samsung customers.

WIRED: Apple Pay has launched in the UK, bringing the contactless payment system to stores including Boots, Costa, Lidl, Marks & Spencer and Nando’s. More than 250,000 shops across the UK will accept Apple Payfrom day one, with Transport for London also supporting the payment method on its network. The UK is the second country to get Apple Pay after the service launched in the USA in October. Read the full article

WIRED: The service, which launched earlier this week, has caused some confusion among early adopters. Apple Pay “creates its own unique ID for each product”, a TfL spokesperson told WIRED.co.uk. This is actually to enhance security: Apple devices do not retain your credit or debit card numbers, but record a unique, encrypted device account number, on a dedicated chip, every time you add a card to an Apple Watch, iPhone or iPad. In this way, Apple ensures that anyone with unauthorised access to your device can’t retrieve your actual bank account information. Read the full article